Jack was sweating, his whole arm aching, but the aura was finally beginning to sheath the dead hare. Luciandro looked on closely, silent for the first time since Jack’s efforts had begun.

The aura dissipated, and Jack let his breath out in a whoosh. It had seemed so easy when Osmando had done it. Or Tiarraluna, come to that, once she’d come to the realization that she couldn’t brute force the jaegers over the rainbow.

He asked the tiny wizard about it.

“Well,” the mouse told him seriously. “It was your first time doing magic of any sort, was it not?”

“I suppose,” Jack nodded. “I mean, I tried a couple of times, but without a focus—”

“And there’s the second reason,” Luciandro nodded, a smile splitting his face.

“But, I have this, right?” Jack was confused.

Luciandro nodded again. “For what it’s worth,” he acknowledged. “But that isn’t exactly a focus yet, Jackson. It’s the beginnings of one at best.

“See, there are reasons mages don’t wander the countryside with pocketsful of unmounted jewels,” he explained. “There’s method to the creation of a focus, and reason behind it. We can go further into that at some point when we’re not so pressed for time as you seem to be at the moment.

“Suffice to say, even a poorly crafted focus would more than halve the mana requirement for that spell you just cast. And the amount of will required would also be lessened considerably.”

Jack looked down at the shard of amber. There seemed to be an inner glow to it, still fading. He looked to the mouse.

“Try again,” Luciandro ordered. “Repetition will make it easier, even without a proper focus. And if you’re going to be struggling, a lesser tier, rank one spell is the thing to struggle with.”

Ten dire hares in, with another ten at least to go, and Jack was gasping for breath, sweat pouring down his face.

“That’s enough for now,” the tiny wizard commanded. “The rest will abide for the time being. Meynardo will be returning soon, and there are a few things left to do.”

“Are your people about ready to move yet?” Jack asked as they neared the shattered village, Luciandro perched on his shoulder. There was a lot of activity, but he wasn’t making much sense of it.

Luciandro cast about the ruins of the village as they approached. “Nearly,” he said.

“There is another task we must complete before we leave, however, if you would grant us the time.”

Jack gave him a suspicious side eye, but shrugged. Meynardo wasn’t back yet, so there wasn’t much he was going to do anyway.

“We cannot hope to keep up with your horses on foot,” the old mouse said. “And the wards on the saddles make it very uncomfortable for any of us to be near them, so at the moment, we cannot ride.”

“You ride horses?” Jack was amazed. “Wait. The saddles are warded?”

“They are, but you miss my point, I think,” Luciandro said dryly. “You must weaken the wards on at least one saddle. Once that is done, anything slower than a trot will be manageable with some small adjustments. The third rank of Manipulate Wards (Lesser), however, is a level that is beyond you at the moment.”

“Why me?” Jack wondered. “Aren’t you a rank thirty wizard? Should be child’s play, right?”

“Human wards,” Luciandro explained. “Human magic. Only a human may remove them. I could explain, but it would take some time, which again....”

“Which we don’t have,” Jack scowled. Mission creep, oh, how he hated it. “Fine,” he grumped. How do I do that?”

“A small bit of preparation first, and then I will show you,” the old mouse nodded, smiling.

They had reached the remains of the village where they’d done the language spell. Jack lowered the old wizard to the ground. Luciandro clapped his hands and Amiandro was there, swaying slightly, but fully erect on his hind feet. A quick patter of instructions in Tandrian, and the youngster was off, shouting to his brethren.

Luciandro trudged over to a wide patch of flattened grass, clearly exhausted. Jack could almost feel his own bones creak as he watched. “Your focus, if you please? Luciandro beckoned.

Jack crouched and laid the stone in the old mouse’s cupped hands.

“Fascinating,” The old wizard mumbled as he examined it. Looking up, he was smiling. “No signs of damage, you’ll be happy to know. Even after all of that. Apparently he’s accepted you. This stone should work just fine."

“He?”

“Life stone, didn’t you say?”

“Ah.”

“Were there contention, there would be clouding in the stone at the least, after the mana you’ve poured through it. Cracks, perhaps. But it remains clear and smooth. It will do just fine until you find something stronger."

By this time, the area around them was filling up with mice. Each of them was carrying something. Some scrap of clothing, some strand of grass, some plant stem. Some of the females had clipped off strands of their own hair. While he was wondering at this, Jack felt something race up his arm. Before he could react, he felt a tug, and caught a glimpse of Amiandro racing back down his cloak with a hank of his hair.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The potbellied mouse he remembered from the initial rescue shouldered his way through the crowd, a large, for him, hammer in one hand. Behind him followed a younger mouse, nearly as burly, carrying a smooth strip of some silvery metal about an inch-and-a-half long and half an inch wide, with a wrapped handle on one end.

“Hold out your hands, please?” Luciandro requested.

Jack gave him the eye, but the tiny wizard nodded towards the ground.

“What’s going on?” Jack asked as he eased forward to lay his hands uncertainly, palms down in the sodden grass.

“A gift,” Luciandro smiled. "A small token from a village to its savior.”

“I wasn’t expecting—”

“And yet,” Luciandro interrupted.

Fine, Jack’s shoulders slumped and he watched the two burly mice approach his grounded hands.

“Try to project some mana,” Luciandro prompted. "You needn’t try anything complicated. Just will some flow. This time through the entirety of both hands and out through all of your fingertips.”

“Haven’t we been over this?” Jack asked.

“Not this,” Luciandro corrected him. “The first was you acting as a source. Any touch would have done the job. The second was you learning a basic spell with an untuned stone. That was meant to be difficult. This is something else.”

Jack gave him the hairy eyeball. What was it with these mundians that they all felt compelled to make everything harder than it needed to be?

Still, he closed his eyes and imagined electricity flowing down his arms and out his fingers. Power, right? Maybe? Without the amber, he wasn’t sure it was possible. Straining, with the twenty iterations of casting soul release behind him, though, it seemed as if he felt a slight tingle.

Luciandro moved forward and placed a hand on each of Jack’s fingers in turn. “Ah, this one,” he instructed the burly mice, indicating the middle finger of his left hand.

Jack opened his eyes and tried to figure out what they were up to.

The older mouse with the hammer gestured and said something up to him.

“Lift this finger, please?” Luciandro requested. “Just a bit? And you needn’t hold out the other hand anymore.”

Jack settled himself more squarely, and raised the finger half an inch or so. The old mouse laid his hammer aside and took the hank of Jack’s hair from Amiandro. He straightened it out, feeding one end under Jack’s finger and around, knotting the ends and leaving the tails hanging.

A female mouse with a babe in arms stepped forward from the crowd, tilting her head and sliding her hand through her long hair, speaking quietly to the old mouse. He nodded and snipped off a small, full length bundle. Another female stepped forward as the first stepped back. She’d already cut some of her own hair and she passed it to the old mouse, who affixed it to one end of the hank he already had in some way Jack couldn’t discern. Another, younger female came forward with her own contribution. And so it went.

Once he had a bundle long enough, the old mouse turned back to Jack and began braiding this new bundle with Jack’s own hair, sliding the original loop around as he twisted the new material around it. This knot was smaller, and laid hard against the first.

The next group to come forward was mixed. Some of it was more hair, some of it was cloth. Some of it even plant stems of some sort. Regardless, the old mouse made a cord and wove it around Jack’s finger, braiding it into the two already there.

Every surviving member of the clan donated something, be it a belt, hair, a portion of clothing, or in one case, a collection of flower petals. Somewhere during the process, Meynardo showed up out of the darkness and held forth a long strip of his green coat and the feather from his bycocket hat. Then Osmando proffered the sleeve they’d torn from his shirt when they’d set his arm. At the end, Luciandro stepped forward and pulled the sash from his robe, passing it forward.

The old mouse, whose name Jack had yet to learn, twisted the band a few more times to get it laying the way he wanted and stepped back to give it a final appraisal. He nodded, whether to himself or his assistant, Jack couldn’t say. But he picked up his hammer and stepped forward again.

This time the assistant came with him. He slid the silver bar between Jack’s skin and the band of donated material as though he knew what he was doing. The old mouse paused, his off hand laying against the edge of the bar and swung his hammer.

It was all Jack could do not to cry out. The tiny hammer hit like he’d slammed his hand in a car door! A cascade of blue-white sparks burst forth from the contact point, lighting the nearby area and the attentive audience. The second blow wasn’t quite the shock, but it hurt just as much.

The process took awhile. The form was apparently five or six blows for a given width, with the assistant raising or lowering his end of the bar. After which the older, what, smith? Slid the band half an inch along and went at it again, each blow deliberate and precise.

What had begun as a ragged band of junk slowly took on a glass smooth, multihued laminate finish. Once the ring had been forged the whole way around, it looked smooth as glass and shone with a faint, inner glow.

The bundle of knots were gathered at the top, and even as Jack was wondering what they were planning with it, the old smith called to the crowd. Osmando plodded forward, an angry scowl on his face. With an unhappy look up at Jack, he doffed his bedraggled hat and removed the silver band, passing it to the smith.

The silver band was hammered down around the circumference of the bundle of knots, and the assistant with the silver bar moved forward again. It only took Jack a few moments to realize what they were doing with the tail ends of the knots. They were fashioning a setting for the amber shard.

Luciandro carefully set the shard within the nest of stiffened fibers, examining and adjusting it a number of times before he was satisfied. He nodded, then, and the smith moved in, different tools in his hands. Some sort of tongs, Jack thought, and a smaller hammer.

Moving with utmost delicacy, the smith gripped each strand in turn, gripping and twisting, tapping against the tongs with the hammer. Jack lost himself in the process. Mouse, the little guy might be. Construct he might be. But the smith was a craftsman, and Jack could appreciate a craftsman in whatever form.

Once the amber shard was solidly affixed, Luciandro moved back into place, sprinkling some sort of powder across the surface of the setting, and passing his hands slowly through the air above the now shining bars. Jack felt power flowing in through his skin, and stifled a grimace. A lot of power.

The whole ring took on a golden glow, and Jack felt heat radiate out from it. And then Luciandro spat out a harsh sounding string of what seemed like gibberish, and the ring darkened, expanded, and then contracted. Three or four times, it did this, before settling into a size that felt snug, but not tight.

Luciandro dropped to the ground, his rear hitting the grass with a thump. “It is done,” he groaned. Looking up, he ordered, “try to remove it, Jackson. Think, ‘come off’ while you’re doing so.”

Jack followed his instructions and the ring slid off like it was three sizes too large. Sliding it back over his finger, he felt it snug down. He gave it a tug, but without the accompanying thought, it wasn’t moving. He pulled it off again and admired it.

It was beautiful. What was the term they used back home? Micarta? He slid it back over his finger and smiled like a twelve year old kid who’d been handed his brand new hunting rifle just in time for opening day.

“Now,” Luciandro wheezed, “pick me up and we’ll see about those other carcasses before I teach you Manipulate Wards.”